The Removal of the seven seals the vision of the four horsemen

(Ch. 6)

The vision of the seven seals acts as an introduction to
the subsequent revelations of the Apocalypse. The removal of the first four
seals presents the four horsemen, who symbolize four factors characterizing the
complete history of mankind. The first two appear as a reason, and the second
two, as a consequence. The crowned rider on the white horse "emerged in
order to be victorious." He personifies those good beginnings, innate
and blessed, with which the Creator endowed mankind: the image of God, moral
purity and innocence, aspiration toward goodness and perfection, the ability to
believe and to love, and individual "talents" with
which man is born, as well as the blessed gifts of the Holy Spirit which man
receives in the Church. In the Creator's plan, these good beginnings should
have been victorious; they should have been able to define a happy future for
humanity. However, already in Eden, man had fallen prey to the Tempter. His nature, corrupted by sin, was
passed on to his descendants; that is why already from
a very young age people are inclined to sin. Through repeated sinfulness, bad
tendencies are reinforced. Thus, man, instead of growing spiritually and
perfecting himself, falls under the ruinous influence of his own passions,
succumbs to various sinful desires, and begins to envy and to show enmity. All
of the crimes in the world arise from the internal strife within man (violence,
war, and every sort of misfortune).

The ruinous actions of the passions are symbolized
by the fiery red horse and rider, who took "peace away from man."
Succumbing to his disorderly sinful desires, man squanders all his
God-given talents, and he becomes impoverished in body and soul. Within the
life of society, enmity and wars lead to a weakening and a breakdown of the
community and to the loss of its spiritual and material resources. This
internal and external impoverishment of mankind is symbolized by the black horse
and rider, who holds a pair of scales in his hand. Finally, the complete loss
of God's blessings leads toward a spiritual death and as a final consequence of
enmity and wars comes the ruin of society and the death of mankind. This
sorrowful destiny of mankind is symbolized by the pale horse.

The four horsemen of the Apocalypse depict in the
simplest way the history of mankind. At first, the blessed life in Eden of our forefathers, called upon to "rule" over
nature (the white horse); then their fall from grace (the fiery red horse);
after which the lives of their descendants were filled with various sorrows and
mutual annihilation (the black and the pale horses). The horses of the
Apocalypse also symbolize the life of the various individual kingdoms, with
their periods of prosperity and decline. Here also is the path of the life of
each man: his childhood purity and innocence, his big potential possibilities,
which are obscured by a tempestuous youthfulness in which a man dissipates his
vigor and health, and in the end he dies. Here is the history of the Church:
the spiritual persecution of Christians during the Apostolic
times and the efforts of the Church to renew human society. However, in the
Church itself there arise heresies and schisms, and the pagan community forces
upon it its persecutions. The Church weakens and retreats into the catacombs,
and some of the local churches totally disappear. Thus, the vision of the four
horsemen sums up the factors which characterize the life of sinning mankind.
This subject will be developed more fully in further chapters. By the removal
of the fifth seal, the Seer shows the brighter side of mankind's calamities.
Christians who have suffered physically were victorious spiritually: they are
now in Paradise (Rev. 6:9-11)! Their feats bring them eternal rewards and
they rule with Christ, as described in the twentieth chapter. The transition to
a more detailed description of the hardships of the Church and the
fortification of the godless is symbolized by the removal of the seventh seal.